LANDSCAPE & MEMORY : On the death of my parents.

Anything in our house of age or memory or antique value--furniture, glassware, or curio--came through my mother, born in Detroit in 1889 and descended from French-Canadians who, in the 1600s, first established themselves along the waterfront in Sandwich, Ontario, across the Detroit River. My mother lived her entire life in Detroit. She was the last of four children and stayed home to be with her mother after her father died. She did not finish high school. She never had a job. She never learned to drive a car, and she remembered indelibly through her mother and grandmother accounts of Indians and missionaries.

From my father's house there was only an old photograph, taken in 1895 at the family farm in Newport, New York, when he was seven. The family stands before its two-story clapboard house. The cuffs on the sleeves of my father's jacket are halfway to his elbows, his haircut fashioned with a bowl. My father graduated from Colgate University--the only one of six siblings to go beyond high school--moved to Michigan at the urging of a classmate, and studied at the Detroit College of Law. He served in the 88th Division in World War I. By a coincidence of logistics, when in 1944 I reached Italy as an infantry replacement in World War II, I was assigned to the 88th.

My parents died in their eighties. Their disparate lives came together in Michigan, melded there as one, and they never left the state. They came from another era. The farthest they commonly traveled was to the cemetery in Sandwich where my mother's ancestors lay buried.

My wife and I were married in 1948 and have lived in California, Michigan, Indiana, and Massachusetts. My parents would not have understood all that we have known, but reluctantly and surely I am approaching my own octogenarian years. As I do so, memories of my parents become sharper in some ways.

At Lake Oakland, northwest of Pontiac, where we sought refuge from Detroit summers, my father could plant carrots at the end of June and harvest them before we went back to the city. His tomato plants magically grew four feet tall in the sand. During the years of World War II he had cultivated a victory garden in a vacant lot, in addition to his own backyard garden. He mowed the lawn and shoveled his sixty feet of sidewalk in winter, but was a little awkward and more careful than when he was younger. But he was in good health. When he had just turned eighty-two we were still putting up the storm windows together, I flying from Boston to Detroit for the visit. But he no longer drove his car and it sat in the garage on softening tires. I expected that he might live forever, if there were time.

For nineteen years our family lived on Westminster Avenue near the geographical center of Detroit, a block and a half east of Woodward Avenue, the city's main thoroughfare. There was a public school on Kenilworth, the next street south, but that was off limits, and we walked three blocks in the opposite direction to attend the Catholic schools on Belmont Avenue.

A fire company on Woodward used our street as a passageway on its eastward runs and trucks clanged regularly through the neighborhood day and night. We were restricted by parental rule to two or three adjoining streets, except to walk cautiously beyond cross-streets on the way to school or to visit school (read "Catholic") friends. I don't recall that we ever owned bicycles, although I knew how to ride one. We had roller skates and ice skates, wagons and scooters and sleds. To the horror of all our mothers, the boys on our street, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike, played "chicken" with the fire engines and would lie down on the pavement ahead of them when we heard the bells and sirens, but always jumping up and running off before we were in any real danger.

In the twenties and thirties the drivers of horse-drawn milk wagons delivered bottles to the door at daybreak, ice wagons hauled hundred-pound blocks which were split into twenty-five- and fifty-pound chunks and carried by iron tongs on the iceman's shoulder. If we were adept enough, we might be able to knock off shards to suck on from blocks still in the wagon.

My father shared a law office with an older attorney, "Colonel" Sheahan, whose brother was road manager for the Detroit Tigers. During the sandlot days of the Depression he kept us supplied with scuffed baseballs, huge scarred bats, and other equipment from the Tigers' surplus. At one time my brother Dan, a year older, owned one of third baseman Marvin Owen's discarded gloves and I played with the extravagant glove of shortstop Billy Rogell.

We had two younger sisters, Mary and Martha, and during our childhood my mother employed a series of maids, who doubled in house-cleaning, some cooking, and taking care of us children. I can remember having supper served rather formally, with my father summoning plates from the kitchen through a swinging door by means of a foot-operated bell under the dining-room carpet.

Help were older black women--Lulu and Mandy--and younger white women--one from Estonia, Sofie from Finland, and a runaway from Kentucky, Nancy Durham, plain and straight-haired, who preferred bare feet to shoes. Nancy was not more than sixteen when she appeared at the door one day looking for work, was taken in--no questions asked, no check with the police--given an upstairs back bedroom, board, and a little spending money. She remained with us for more than three years. If this was a little unconventional, so be it. The Depression did strange things to propriety and common sense.

The other white women also lived in, but the black women were day-help and traveled by streetcar from some faraway neighborhood that we barely knew about. Mandy was a hearty, big-chested woman who, when Mother was out of the house, chastened our mischief by locking us in a dark closet beneath the stairs that smelled of rubber galoshes.

Long after we were grown, after moving from Westminster, after college, after the war, my mother still brought in day-help for cleaning. Her mind had been made up long ago about minorities, but she was constrained with arthritis and she hung on for expediency's sake until one day when she had an encounter with a young woman, Linda, that ended all the mistress-servant foolishness. Linda announced that she couldn't come on the following Monday because that was "bump day." To my mother's inquiry and mortification, Linda said that was a day when her church, led by the pastor, went to downtown Detroit on the busy sidewalk in front of J. L. Hudson's to "bump white folks into the gutter." Linda was about my age and in her way charming, but she had to know when she came that day that she would be summarily fired. All she asked was carfare to get home, which I gave her and bade her good-bye, so she could disappear into Detroit's Lower East Side and await the poignant church-led assault on Monday. "Just forget whatever you heard," my mother said and walked slowly into the back yard, where she stood against the fence for a long time.

I remember photographs of my mother in her teens, a small girl given to plumpness, her pale face round, her lips thin. In her sixties she was not much over five feet tall, quite visibly shorter than in her fifties, and the plumpness, much of which she had lost in her middle years, had returned.

With it had come the arthritis that would leave permanent disabilities. Her twisted fingers looked as if someone had beat on them and they were welted and lumpy and bent at uncomfortable angles. In the kitchen I noticed that she had trouble handling pots. More and more, cereal boxes, milk cartons, screw-top jars, and tightly wrapped bread were beyond her. Her soft earth shoes massaged feet whose toes had painfully curled under. She walked with the help of a black cane.

I never saw bitterness between my parents, although my father commonly teased and my mother may have been annoyed, but she did not tease in return. Perhaps she was not mentally agile enough or lived life too seriously. In argument she tended to be trivial, but she would argue. She was essentially shy, sometimes moody, and could easily fall into melancholia.

If my parents were sometimes quarrelsome, neither was willfully mean or strident with the other. They held their anger in check. They respected each other's idiosyncrasies. They complemented and appreciated each other in ways that we did not discern or understand, nor was it our province to do so. We were sure they viewed marriage and family as a privilege and a trust. If somewhat over-disciplined, ours was a peaceful home.

In 1925, my parents purchased the cottage on Lake Oakland, where the family spent summers from school's end to Labor Day as we children were growing up. The cottage cost a thousand dollars. Fourteen years later, full of memories, it and all its furnishings were sold for slightly more than the original figure to a butcher from Royal Oak. Despite many improvements in the cottage, my father was never able to fix the leaky roof.

In the years at the cottage my mother never hiked to frog-laden Sashabaw Creek like the rest of us. She did picnic with us on the hill behind the cottage, however, and we laughed to see her crawl under the fence, which she did, as I remember, with considerable grace. She would swim from the dock at the lake's edge, but never went deeper than her chest. Once, she said, as she stood in shallow water in her high-necked, skirted, black bathing suit, a long-nosed garpike swam across her toes and startled her. She went reluctantly in the boat with my father. She never fished, though she cleaned our catch of bluegills and perch without a word when we were too young to handle a knife.

I realized later that the days at the lake were really no pleasure for my mother. The moments in the sun or feeling the breeze beneath the willows on the shore, dangling her feet from the dock or walking through the thick lakeside clover, hardly balanced the meals prepared on a balky kerosene stove, the clothes soaked in a galvanized tub, the floors swept of sand, the slivers removed, the sunburns soothed (my father's, too), and the tolerance shown for all manner of crawling, jumping, swimming, digging, and flying things. There were spiders, crayfish, mud puppies, a broken-winged blue kingfisher lying crumpled in a box, Johnny darters, frogs, turtles, gophers, snakes, dragonflies, stink bugs, caterpillars, and beautiful night moths among them, which we kept in pails and jars and makeshift cages. The first summer Nancy was with us she wriggled a piece of rope at my mother in the kitchen and said it was a snake. My mother was momentarily frightened and thought this was completely inappropriate and told my father so.

I remember a day when my father crawled silently along the shore on his belly through weeds and muck to catch a feeding muskrat in his hands. He snatched the animal into the air with a triumphant yell, his fingers firmly around its neck, the hind legs scratching at his wrist. He was forty-six at the time and my mother admonished him for his recklessness and for being a "showoff" when he carried the muskrat into the cottage, but I, being twelve, was proud. He told us that, at the Newport farm, he and his brothers had trapped muskrats and sold the pelts to a favorite schoolteacher. It was from him that we learned the names of trees and flowers and all the swimming and crawling creatures.

While my mother feigned interest in spiders and crayfish, she displayed a natural liking for birds and kept a chart above her stove of those she had come to know. From a pocket guide "illustrated in color" which she bought at Woolworth's, she cut out their profiles and pinned them to the chart. In her quiet way she soon knew more of bird lore than all the rest of us. When we eventually left the cottage she took down her chart, folded it away, and kept it in her trunk of memories in her bedroom in the city.

The family moved to Grandville Road in Redford, a Detroit suburb, in 1940 when I was a freshman at Notre Dame. Twenty years later my wife and I were in Massachusetts with six children; a seventh was born after we had settled in. When my parents visited us in the East, it was the first airplane flight for both of them. My mother was seventy that year, my father seventy-one.

At Grandville my mother gained a front porch to sit on, and, on a good day, she would rock the entire length of the porch, about eighteen feet from railing to wrought-iron railing as her chair slipped sideward almost imperceptibly, a fraction of an inch with each forward motion and skidded an equal distance on the back stroke, so that by twilight she would have to rise and tug the rocker back to where she had begun. She would lean heavily on the chair as she tugged, her soft shoes shuffling along the concrete deck. She kept a keen eye on the neighborhood from her chair, and once was astonished when a dark stranger appeared leading a pot-bellied pig. It was far and away an improvement over the raucous fire engines of Westminster.

During one visit to Grandville, from my room at the top of the stairs, I heard her once at night. My parents were locking up and I listened as my father set the bolt and tried the knob on the front door. Formerly, at Westminster, where the banister from upstairs turned a corner and from where the view downward past the staircase window with its patch of stained glass ended in darkness, I had often heard them saying their evening rosary, sitting beside each other in the living room. Their harmonious petitions entered and echoed into every corner of the house.

"Look back," she said. "We've raised four children, put them all through college, and one has come through the war." (Dan, who had been ill with rheumatic fever in high school, didn't see combat but served in postwar Japan, came home, joined the Congregation of Holy Cross as a religious brother, and taught at Saint Edward's University in Austin for forty-two years.) Coming up the stairs she sounded tired and a little cross but talked on, as if life's accomplishments were not all that she thought had been promised her. Certainly she had ambitions she never realized. She regretted I had not been an officer. (My father had been a sergeant.) And Dan, having traveled that far, she reasoned, should have become a priest.

At the cottage, lying beneath the window where the moon streamed in and lit the old painted bureau, had my mother crankily but rightfully complained about how everything had gone wrong, how the pan beneath the icebox had overflowed onto the kitchen floor (had I neglected to empty it?), how someone had stepped on glass and cut a foot, and how she had been, most of all, alone, with my father at his office in Detroit? Did she plead with him: "I'm not suited for this. I have no friends here. I don't drive. I'm not able to get away"?

Did they make love in that room, later tiptoeing out to the bathroom, crossing the worn rug in the middle room, avoiding the red-lacquered chairs, the low wicker table, being careful not to squeak the doors? Mosquitoes hummed in the darkness of our rooms. Outside there would be the pervasive odor of skunk. Mice played in the kitchen at night. If it rained, we could count on the roof leaking and would all be up placing pans under the leaks and would return to our beds hearing the plinking in the pans, the drumming on the roof. Did they make love under cover of the rain?

I had never known exactly how old my mother was until her sixtieth birthday. She wouldn't tell me, and my father professed lamely that he didn't know. One time, she said, "If I tell you, then we'll both know," and looked at me slyly. And one day, in a later year, when we were alone, she told me that she was frightened of death. It was odd coming from her. I was visiting for a longer time than usual, and I spent more of it with her.

"I'm afraid of dying," she admitted. (She would live another fourteen years.) Then: "Would you hold my hand?"

I did, incautious as it was, because we were driving at the time through the streets of Detroit. Occasionally when I was home she would ask me to take her into the city and we would go east, then west, then south, past places familiar and unfamiliar, both recognizable and newly strange, and eventually downtown where she wanted to visit again the streets of her childhood. But the streets were no longer there. In their place were massive batches of concrete and tons of steel, freeways, and ramps, and the exact location of her birth house could not even be determined.

"My mind just wanders," she said. "I get so worn out. I find myself wondering what is on the other side, and I can't talk about it with your father." Her fingers tightened on my hand. "It doesn't matter," she said. "Let's go home." In silence, somewhere near McNichols Road, I felt her fingers slip from mine.

Surprisingly, my father died first. He had stopped going to his office, traveling the five miles downtown by bus and back, when he was seventy-nine. For several years he had been working a shorter day, in anticipation of retirement. He had done about everything he had wanted to do. His children had grown to responsible adulthood; he had known and loved nineteen grandchildren. (We had never known our grandparents, my mother's father having died in 1913, her mother in 1925, and my father's parents in the years between.)

On an early autumn Sunday, when he was several years short of retiring, we took a final trip to Lake Oakland. My mother was resting on the porch and we promised to be back by six o'clock. We walked along the creek bank, pulling ourselves through head-high alder, grown since we had last been there. Our shoes sank into moist ground and frogs zigzagged ahead of us. It was in this reach that my father had caught the feeding muskrat some thirty years earlier. We crawled around a fallen willow, and within the framework of its downed branches a colony of blue-fringed gentian bloomed, mouths flecked with pollen. We climbed upward to a field of tall corn, walked the edge, and came out on a dirt road. I was exhilarated and my father, although breathing hard, looked as good as I had seen him in years. We stood in the sun, admiring it all. I could have been ten or twelve, barefoot in the dirt, stamping to see the imprint of my foot, dust puffing up between my toes, warm beneath the sun and the vast unbroken sky. In memory, I spun on the balls of my feet, hopped crazily on my heels, then bent and gathered a few stones from the road to peg at the glistening, inviting, green-glass insulators atop the telephone poles, hearing the wires sing.

My mother's eyes were closed and shadows were lengthening when we returned. In the rocker she was barely marking time. Evening was drifting into the street and lights coming on in neighboring houses. My father brought out a robe and laid it across her lap and tucked it in around her legs. With one corner he covered her crooked fingers. I walked over to Outer Drive to bring home takeout dinners.

In 1971, my wife and I drove to Notre Dame for our son Tom's graduation, and on the way back to Massachusetts we stopped over in Detroit. My father, three months short of his eighty-third birthday, looked weak, was walking hesitantly, and doing a great deal of coughing. My mother said that he had lung cancer but wasn't aware of it and we should not bring it up. She apologized for not having told us sooner, but she had difficulty even acknowledging it. When I talked with him, I suggested that both of them would be better off in a nursing home.

"For one thing," I said, "you're both starving."

"I've brought it up, but your mother won't go. She wants to stay here."

With the difficulty she had getting around, my parents had been eating only two meals a day. My father tried to help out, but she wouldn't relinquish her kitchen. Her legs would no longer get her up and down the stairs, and in January they had the four-poster mahogany beds that came from her house moved down to the dining room.

"Your father doesn't want to go to a home," she said later. "He wouldn't be happy there." They were at an impasse, growing uncommonly irritable, speaking but failing to understand each other. I don't believe my father suspected the cancer, and I think my mother was wrong in not telling him. It would have given urgency to whatever decision they might make.

My mother gave me the doctor's name and I called him. "I want to know what is wrong with my father," I said.

"If you want to know, ask your mother," he replied.

I wasn't prepared for this rudeness and insisted that he tell me everything.

"Well, he has lung cancer. It's beyond treatment now. He is eighty-two years old, after all."

"Did you do a biopsy?" I asked.

"Your father's too old and weak for that."

"Doctor, he's coughing a lot. Can't you give him something to relieve that?"

The conversation ended on an unsatisfactory note, and my appeal to my mother met with a declaration of her complete trust in the doctor. He was her doctor, too.

I called Dan in Texas and suggested that he get an emergency leave and come to Detroit. My sisters and I agreed that our parents had to get out of their house and find someplace where they could be suitably cared for, but we had not been sufficiently persuasive.

"We've been down all the avenues," Mary said in desperation. Dan flew to Detroit, but had no more luck than we did and went back within a week.

Two weeks later my father was taken to the hospital and died there of pneumonia. There was no cancer. The diagnosis had been incorrect. The X-rays had been misread. The doctor was stunned and apologetic. My mother was devastated and never saw or spoke to the doctor again. There was no thought of a malpractice suit. Good people did not do that in 1971; we took our lumps.

After my father's death my mother sold the house with Mary's help and moved in with Martha and her family for nearly a year. While the house was still for sale, however, she had begun willy-nilly giving away to neighbors her heirloom French chairs that previously she so carefully protected with covering sheets when toddlers were in the house.

She did go into a nursing home when she left Martha's. Within six months she moved, and within another year, to yet a third home. She detested the homes, one no better than the other, she complained, and my sisters, who picked up her laundry and brought her extra food, were given to understand that she was not an easy patient.

When I visited her in the first home I would push her in her wheelchair around the block to admire the gardens and trellises and hanging plants. But her interest lagged and she sat impassively, gazing forward, her bent, useless hands in her lap. Sometimes I would bring my nieces and nephews with me and we would take pictures of them with "Mimi," but her response was minimal.

Toward the end, one day when I came into her room she did not immediately know me. The following day she recognized me but was confused, thinking I still lived in Indiana. "It's been three years," she said mysteriously.

"Yes," I agreed, aware that she was drifting.

"The Steiners were here last night," she whispered, "and the Quinns, but you haven't come until now." She turned on her pillow and began to cry. The Steiners I knew had passed away, but I was uncertain about the Quinns.

"Where have you been? We used to be friends." Her right arm was tucked under the sheet and her left was spasmodically twitching. She lay in a fetal position, tiny and shrunken on the nursing home bed. Her face was round and small, with strands of white hair about her ears. Without her glasses her eyes seemed nearly blind.

"There's a woman who swears," she said, as if suddenly she had remembered something of importance. I had to lean forward to catch her words. "I don't like her."

We talked of the Quinns, Natalie and George, whose daughter Beth had moved to Arizona many years ago.

"Arizona," my mother sighed. "That's too far." She wiped her eyes on a corner of the sheet and said, "Natalie looks awful."

When she was finally asleep, I told the nurse that I was leaving. I stood outside my mother's door for a moment, looking back. The corridor was oddly empty: the traffic of nurses and carts had moved on. Then a voice came through the stillness, soft as a whisper, from where I do not know, a disappointed soul waiting for her Jesus, mistaking defeat for what was soon to be victory: "Lord, Lord almighty." Then, louder, drawn out and insistent: "Oh, Goddamnit. Goddamnit. Goddamnit."

I never saw my mother alive again. She died in March, three months before her eighty-ninth birthday, having moved from walker to wheelchair to bedridden confinement on the third floor of a nursing home, her muscles practically evaporated, at the end unable to hold up her head and recognizing no one, her days completed.

It was seven years between their deaths but it was like a month. I did not want to know that my parents were dead. I did not and do not understand death that easily. I vowed not to kneel in that solemn parlor, where the dark-suited mortuary lackeys were standing at parade rest, a strange priest my parents never knew was leading prayers for the dead, and the closed-lipped mourners sat within the breath of too-perfect blossoms, sidewise glancing to learn by whom the garlands had been sent. (I thought my father in his time would have preferred scarlet bee balm and black-eyed Susans.) But I did kneel there and I saw my parents made up and dressed up, resting in their satin-lined caskets, clutching rosaries in their lifeless hands.

I took the family to my mother's funeral in Detroit, and coming back on the New York Thruway, we drove off at Utica and went north to my father's Newport farm. He had given me directions when I first had begun visiting from Massachusetts, but often I was flying and this was the first opportunity I really had to drive there, although I needed the aid of a clerk at a country store to get to the final turn. He knew the place, he said. He had heard his father speak of my father's family. The farm had been sold at auction to an absentee landlord after my Uncle Will, who lived on the farm, died. Since then, for all practical purposes, it had been deserted.

"The farm is gone," the clerk said, "so you won't be surprised."

"Gone?"

"Tore down," he said. "House, barn, all tore down."

"Who?"

"Scavengers."

We approached through exhausted, haphazard, weed-grown fields. Only a cellar hole of chiseled and fitted stone was evidence of any kind of dwelling when we parked the car and walked over the grounds. Newspapers, broken glass, and beer cans littered the basement and, in the darkest corner, a patch of snow remained. The ground had been dug up in places where rhubarb or roses or something thought to be of value had long ago been taken. The barn's stone foundation had been smashed, run into by someone's jousting truck perhaps, and stones removed. A few broken, moss-edged boards lay scattered where the barn had been, as if these alone had been too miserable to steal.

Scavengers, the man had said. Someone needed a door, a pair of hinges, a piece of siding, a window frame, a few old barn boards, stones to erect a new foundation. The country was abandoned to teasel, juniper, and old-field cedar. I walked through the fields where my father and his father together had walked. How to explain eighty years?

I wiped my face with my hand, finding tears. Wind scurried over the farm, a hint of more snow to come. Out of sight a bird called, an early arrival, perhaps a horned lark. I was only guessing: I could not name it. My mother would have known, had she been there.

I traveled down to a brook among dark maples, where the early skunk cabbage leaves were just beginning to appear. Ice was still tight in spirals along the banks. A place for cruising muskrats, I thought, but though I waited several minutes peering into the black water I saw none, nor did anything move except the wind.

Returning up the slope, I picked a solitary stone from the ground and weighed it in my hand; then, reaching back, threw it as far as I could across the land.

Saturday mornings at Lake Oakland, before the sun was up, with the sky streaked pink, we would be at the dock, untying the boat. Rowing out into the lake, my father at the oars, which made only light sucking noises in the water, Dan and I squatted in opposite ends of the boat. We would watch for low-flying herons along the shore, and somewhere hear gentle mourning doves in the breaking dawn. Oars dipped, we headed up to the mouth of Sashabaw Creek to fish.

Halfway down the hill to the lake, my father had planted an elliptical bed of red and white petunias for my mother. From the cottage door, by a trick of perception, it appeared perfectly round. I wish I could have done as much.

My parents are buried beside each other in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, Michigan, below a slight rise in the ground and in the shadow of a double-trunked white birch tree.

John A. Lynch lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. His "The Art of Giving" appeared in the February 26, 1999 Commonweal.